What to do to counter an institutional bias of the Wikimedia Foundation (part 2)

Our aim is to share the sum of the knowledge available to us with everyone, everywhere, in every language. That is what we are to achieve.

As we establish what we, as a movement, are to do, it follows that we need to measure how well we do. When a community does not play an active part for a particular goal, that too will show in the numbers.

Commons does not need to work in English only. The "Special:MediaSearch" works in all the languages we support. With this search engine enabled on every Wikipedia, we will learn how well it gets adopted in  all our languages. We will know if new Wikidata labels are used in searches on Commons. We will know if more diversity is realised in the pictures used in Wikipedia. We will know how many pictures are downloaded and from what languages.

Only in the Portuguese Wikipedia we find the governors of Mozambican provinces only in text. We can include them in Wikidata, make Listeria lists for them, but how do we disambiguate these politicians. What does it take to make the information for them usable for "abstract Wikipedia"?  How do we assemble information about countries like Mozambique and how do we get it to the quality level that some expect? As important, how do we get people from Mozambique interested and involved? 

Some Wikipedians opine that the Wikimedia Foundation does not need to raise funding for their project. Arguably this is correct, but we can raise funds for other projects, other languages elsewhere because we have more and other ambitions to realise. As we raise more money outside of the USA, more people will gain a sense of ownership. 

When we are to overcome our bias for English and our bias for Wikipedia, we need to market our other languages, our other projects. We need key performance indicators.. For Wikisource, how many books were downloaded. For Commons how many media files were downloaded and from what language.

Results need to be objective and measurable. As our research proves to have been about English Wikipedia we have a problem. We seriously need to consider to what extend it is applicable.

Thanks,

      GerardM

NB While the bias is real and the relationship with English Wikipedians is often antagonistic, it is important to recognise  English Wikipedia as the source for much of the information that ends up in other projects. When we collaborate more, our available data will reach more people in an informative way.

@Wikipedia; the dread that is one identity that binds us all

On Twitter Janeen Uzzell praised a blogpost that is the Wikimedia Foundation All Hands: 2020 Sketchbook and indeed it informs about current thinking, most of it is great and still, I find it absolutely terrifying.

There are several great sketches in there. Katherine Maher gave an asperational talk, I love it for Wikimedia to be seen as infrastructural, inclusive and even that that what we do does not have to be in our projects. Important is that she mentions "support systems" because they provide the input for much of our processes.

Important is the page on security and risk. All the important concepts are mentioned among them; likelihood, relative impact and management preparedness but also "plan for and mitigate risks".

What truly makes me uneasy is when it is said that we aim to clarify who we are in the world in one brand, Wikipedia. The idea is that when we are all branded as Wikipedia, things are likely to become easier. When you check out the website brandingwikipedia.org there is no argument; Wikipedia is free knowledge. When you check out what it is to do

• project and improve our reputation
• support our movement/growth
• be opt-in

In the abstract Wikipedia IS wonderful, in reality the concept of what Wikipedia is, is largely determined by the English Wikipedia. It it is fiercely independent, it is hardly inclusive and it has largely determined the maneuvering space the Wikimedia Foundation has. In order to "plan for and mitigate risks", I will mention several reasons why I am anxious because of this branding initiative.

• In the Commons OTRS they use English Wikipedia notions to determine if pictures can stay or are to be removed. Commons provides a service to all Wikimedia projects
• The query functionality for Commons is maintained by people from the Foundation. For more than half a year it puts a strain on the growth and usefulness of Wikidata. Tools have become glacially slow and often malfunction because an edit is not available when needed in further processing. It is not known what the position of the WMF director is in this. 
• This is about marketing and we have never done much marketing for any of our projects. What we have done was reactive and has been all about the English Wikipedia. Now consider this:
• Wikisource, we do not know what is available at what quality, it is all about editing and not about having people read the finished article, consequently we do not value Wikisource and fulfill its potential.
• So far Commons has always been English only. With the support of the "depicts" functionality, there is room to enable and market  a multilingual search engine. In the spirit of "it is a Wiki", it serves as an open invite to add labels in any and all of our languages and open up what Commons has to offer. It is how to market free content the Wiki way.
• In Wikidata we know many more concepts than what we know in any individual Wikipedias. We could use our data and inform as we have done for years in multilingual tools like Reasonator. This is an example in English Russian Chinese and Kannada. NB it takes additional labels to improve results and consequently this is the inclusive approach.
• When Wikipedians were willing to reflect on their own performance, we could help them solve their false friends issues.

One sketch in the sketchbook is a presentation by Jess Wade. It says that even Academia is biased. As the Wikimedia community we do not need to be subservient to any bias and most certainly not the bias that Wikipedia has brought us.

Francesco Redi and the #BHL - A purpose for #Wikisource

Mr Redi is of a stature that his statue is in the Uffizi Gallery. His books are available in the Internet Archive, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  Wikisourcers waved their magic on several of his books and the result is a superior output for for instance "Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl'insetti".

Mr Redi has four books who received the Wikisource treatment.. and then what? In response to a tweet, I was told of the existence of these books in Wikisource. I checked them on Wikidata and added Mr Redi as the author. There is nothing to indicate in Wikisource where the book came from (the BHL provided them with a DOI).

In a tweet, the BHL indicated that they are interested in books that received the Wikisource treatment. So lets consider where we are:

• Wikisource has many great books transcribed and available as an ebook
• It is not known outside of Wikisource what books are available in what quality and where they came from
• We could have this information in Wikidata. It will give a clue what is available; we can query for the books when they are in Wikidata
• What is the purpose of Wikisource if it is not for people to read all these fine books?

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikisource - the proof of the pudding

A user story for Wikisource could be: As Wikisourcerers we transcribe and format books so that our public may read these books electronically.

The proof of the pudding is therefore in the people who actually read the finished books.  To future proof the effort of the Wikisourcerers, it is vital to know all the books that are ready for reading. It is vital to know this for books in any and all languages supported.

There are two issues:

• The status of the books is not sufficiently maintained in all the Wikisources
• There is no tool that advertises finished books

To come to a solution, existing information could be maintained in Wikidata for all Wikisources in a similar way as done for badges. With the information in Wikidata a queries can be formulated that shows the books in whatever language, by whatever author.

Currently there are Wikisources that do not register this information at all. This does not prevent us from making the necessary steps towards a queriable solution. After all adding missing badges at a later date only adds to the size of the pudding, not to the proof of the pudding.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Wikimedia - #notadog and #notmemberofthepack

It is controversial when you tell the #Wikipedia crowd that they do not look after their own. I am not a Wikipedian, I do not want to be as my experiences are not that positive. It is not that I do not care deeply about free content and the opportunities the Wikimedia Foundation offers.

My point is simple; as a community we seem to be only interested in the production and maintenance of content and not really in the quality of the reader experience / the consumption of all the good stuff that exists. I will support it with a number of examples.

Wikimania is the annual Wikimedia conference and it boasts many high grade presentations important for the understanding of the past and the history of what we do. For this reason it makes sense to do a thorough job and include all the presentations in Wikidata so that we provide the same opportunity to explore this content as we do for TED conferences and presentations. When we do, we will honour the many Wikimedians who presented in the past. This may prove controversial because of the many conflicting notions of notability.

Wikisource is "Wikimedia project, an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki". For readers there is one vital problem. Much of it are works in progress, some need a finishing touch others still need a lot of tender loving care. With a different approach to finished goods and, it is easy enough to know the status of sources, a clean user interface can be delivered to potential readers expanding the reach of the work that is done.

Commons is an "online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files, part of the Wikimedia Foundation". As a repository it functions really well. Large numbers of media files are deposited and used within the Wikimedia projects but my experience is that when you seek an image, it is really hard. The category system is hard to navigate, there are no labels attached to images that help finding relevant content and it is English only. Finding something among 32,289,013 files is really hard. For now I have given up on Commons.

Being critical of Wikipedia is frowned upon. A typical response is "so fix it" but when solutions are offered that improve its quality, typically a suggestion falls on deaf ears. It is easy enough to improve the functionality of red links, but this idea is probably to mundane to consider even though it has been proven to be easy to implement.

People fault me for being blunt. To some extend it is part of the culture I grew up in; to some extend it is because I have lost faith in the "community". My experience is that there is too much group think and I am definitely not a member of the pack, I prefer to make up my own mind, I articulate my opinions and arguments and care not too much when people react negatively without considering the arguments.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikimedia - #India and #Wikisource

Subhashish Panigrahi wrote about the challenges facing Wikipedia and the languages of India. It is a good article and it is well worth a read.

It presents eight challenges, the one of most interest is that people often feel that their language is not present on the web. The question is how to raise relevance on the web.

When you consider relevant projects in the Indian language, the one that stands out most is Wikisource. It is an easy point of entry to writing in a language; it trains people to use their language in their script. What is to be written is in a scan so language proficiency is not even assumed.

As a member of the language committee I am on record that if there is a credible growth path for a Wikisource particularly when a notable organisation will support the project for at least a year, I want us to allow a new Wikisource as soon as possible.

At the same time we need to consider how to make the effort in Wikisource more visible. I want someone with some "marketing" savvy to consider how to bring our finished projects to potential readers. There are plenty of people in India and elsewhere. Investing just a little will have encourage our projects a lot and it may increase our community a lot.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia & Project #Gutenberg - the sum of all knowledge

"To share in the sum of all knowledge" is the vision of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Swiss chapter does understand this really well. It has adopted Kiwix, an off line reader for content that is published in the ZIM format.

Project Gutenberg is a well established organisation dedicated to the digitisation of books. Its catalogue of 50.000 public domain books is now available to everybody, everywhere and offline as well.

Thanks to a hackathon, all books are now available in the ZIM format, you can search in all the books at the same time. The best news is that not only has this work been done for a first time, it is build in such a way that it can be easily repeated.

Future deployments may include all the books of Wikisource, books from other sources and even copyrighted works as well. The point of Kiwix is that it is an enabler, it allows for the dissemination of knowledge and to achieve THAT is what our aim is.

Congratulations to the Swiss Wikimedia chapter for providing the sustained support of this valuable project.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Pinocchio - a #Wikidata #books showcase

The Adventures of Pinocchio was identified as a great example of a book in Wikidata, Many great arguments were made why this particular work is such a great target:

• it is a very well know story
• it has been translated in many languages
• entries for single characters are already available in Wikidata
• scanned and proofread text is available in Wikisource, Commons, IA
• it has inspired several derived works

When you search for "Pinocchio", you will find many references; to movies, species as well as the many translations and adaptations of the book by Mr Collodi. Many of them could do with some attention. When you zoom in on the character of the "Coach man", you will find a picture waiting to be moved to Commons.

What also could get some attention is the presentation of authors, books and even editions in the Reasonator itself. Not only is there the layout to be considered, there are also the inferences that can be made. For instance should the "derived works" even "derived characters" be shown..

Thanks,

      GerardM

It is elementary dear #Wikisource

Arthur Conan Doyle is the poster child for the #Wikidata integration of Wikisource. Having such an example is important because it enables to look at all the issues that may arise.

As the process of importing information is under way, it is therefore the best of times to look first for problems in Wikidata. As the Reasonator visualises the information, it is an obvious place to start. Moving the BISYS reference to the external sources is something I am trusted to do so that was an easy one.

What is problematic is the reference of Mr Conan Doyle to so many movies as a "screenwriter". The works he authored have been the basis for the real screenwriter to write his or her script. This practice is not isolated to Mr Conan Doyle, it is suggested that Shakespeare wrote scripts for many movies as well.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikisource in #Wikidata

Wikisource is finding its way into Wikidata. It is different. The Wikipedia article about a book is something considered relevant in any language.

Wikisource provides an integral text in one language. Much of the information about a source is therefore relevant only in that language. The characters in that source are all in that one language. It may even be that the names of characters are different from one edition to another.

It is early days for Wikisource in Wikidata. It will be interesting to see it develop.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikidata supports #Wikisource - and so does WD #Search

The first wiki links from Wikisource have been added to Wikidata. Magnus has already updated WDsearch to support Wikisource.

This is excellent news.

The one thing that really blew my socks is that the English Wikipedia makes use of WDsearch. If anything it is proof that Wikidata adds value. The best part is that it will only get better.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikisource is coming to #Wikidata

The next Wikimedia project that will be supported by Wikidata is Wikisource. As a consequence new messages are available for translation in translatewiki.net. The user experience will be so much better when the software has been properly localised.

Please make Wikidata even better by localising the MediaWiki software in your language.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Beyond extended #search

Forget #Wikipedia for a moment. #Wikidata does more; it supports #Commons, #Wikivoyage and it will support #Wikisource really soon now. Wikidata adds value particularly when it is used in the context of the Wikis that make use of it.

Many people consider that Wikidata is there to support their Wikipedia. It is equally true that Wikidata is able to support the Wikivoyages. As more projects are supported, the fallacy that Wikidata exist to support a specific wiki becomes even more obvious.

The Wikidata extension to search results reflects nicely the power of Wikidata. It helps with the disambiguation of the items, it indicates if there are Wikipedia and now Wikivoyage articles, you can be directed to Commons to find images and finally it shows what it has to offer by presenting information nicely in the Reasonator.

The news in this blog post is that Wikivoyage features among the results for each item. What is new to most people is that the Wikidata extension to search is not restricted to Wikipedia. It will work equally well on Commons and Wikivoyage .. Wikibooks and Wiktionary.
Thanks,
     GerardM

A challenge for #Wikidata

Not only #Wikipedia but also #Wikisource and #Wikiquote are in need for the #Wikidata treatment. OmegaWiki can demonstrate why. Julius Caesar has an article in all the languages with a translation. All that is needed is a link to Wikidata where Julius is known as "Q1048".

Linking to the quotes of Caesar on Wikiquote is not so easy; it has to be done for each language to the Wikiquote where there are quotes by Caesar. This is also needed for Wikisource for books or other publications. You may notice that Julius Caesar is a writer and a person. A writer publishes and any person may produce quotable quotes.

The challenge for Wikidata is to go the extra mile and rid us from those pesky interwiki links... on all the Wikimedia projects. These links can in return be used on all the projects. It also makes searching more interesting... Julius Caesar; what do you want? An article about him, his sources, his quotes..

What we at OmegaWiki would like is for Wikidata to go even further and incorporate our data. This will be a big benefit because it will allow people to search in Nepali for जुलियस सिजर and have a similar result at no extra cost as in English.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Learning to type #Arabic; #Wikisource exercises

The one skill that makes it easy to use a computer is typing with ten fingers. Particularly when you learn a new script, you need to learn to type again. Learning this skill well means exercises.

I remember when I learned to type on a typing machine that I hated the futility of these exercises. Now that I need the skills to learn Arabic, I can think of exercises that are of use to everyone.

The WIKISOURCE for the Arabic language.

All Wikisources have the ProofreadPage extension installed. So all that is needed to tap in the vast pool of people that are learning to type Arabic is having pages ready using this tool.

My skill in Arabic is such that I can not easily find these. When I have, the Arabic Wikisource has its first volunteer that will exercise and do good at the same time.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Kiwix - the interview

#Kiwix is the tool that allows you to read the content of a Wiki offline. It has been developed with Wikipedia in mind but is equally usable for Wikisource or Wikibooks. I am really happy to have interviewed Emmanuel who knows all the ins and outs of this wonderful piece of software.
Thanks,
     GerardM


What is Kiwix and what is it used for
Kiwix is a software that wants to enable people to read Web contents without internet connection. It's a reader which works with ZIM files containing all the content. It's used to access Wikipedia offline, by reading pre-packaged Wikipedia ZIM files. It's mainly used by people who want to have an encyclopedia, but are too poor to have access to the internet. It's also used,for example, by travelling people (plane, ship, train), prisoners and students at school. 

Can you tell us something about its popularity
We have users all over the world and the audience is increasing quickly: we have had 25.000 downloads of Kiwix in May. 

In how many languages is Kiwix supported 
Thank to the Translatewiki Web site andits community, Kiwix is localised in more than 80 languages. We also provide content (ZIM files), mainly Wikipedia, in around 25 languages. But we want to do more: thanks to a grant of WMCH soon we will offer ZIM files of Wikipedia in all languages. 

How do you support languages written in scripts like Malayalam, or Tibetan
Contents are Web contents and Kiwix itself is a sort of browser getting the Web pages from the ZIM file instead of the Web. So, we do not have special handling in Kiwix itself to render the contents. Everything should be well organised in the ZIM file, for example by using Web fonts. But, from the Kiwix fulltext search engine point of view, this is challenging. Natural languages have a lot of particularities. Kiwix uses the Xapian search engine and tries to integrate CLucene. We do our best with them to offer the smoothest user experience possible. 

Do you provide fonts with Kiwix for the languages that use these scripts
The Wikipedia ZIM files we are preparing still do not provide the Web fonts. Already for a few months, the integration of Web fonts has been a part of the Wikimedia projects, so we have to fix that ASAP, this is not a big challenge.

For some languages like Chinese and Serbian, we show the content in two scripts ... Can Kiwix do this as well ?
Kiwix does not provide any transliteration tool for now, but all the technology is already there in the soft. We use a powerful unicode library called ICU (http://site.icu-project.org/) which can do that. We
want to use it to allow users to do custom transliterations. C++ developer wanted there!

Kiwix uses the OpenZIM format ... can you tell us more about this format
The format is called ZIM. There is a volunteer driven project called openZIM  created a few years ago to specify the format and develop a standard library. The ZIM format allows to put millions of contents together, to compress a part of them, and add Metadata. In the end, you get only one file, which is, at the same time, extremely compressed and allows a constant and quick random access.

Nowadays, many publications are in the EPUB standard ... can Kiwix handle this as well
Kiwix is not able to deal with EPUB, but in the future it will. We think EPUB & ZIM format are complementary and we want Kiwix being able to perfectly deal with EPUB. Our plan is to integrate "Monocle" to do that. Also there, developers are wanted.

How do people find content available for Kiwix
Kiwix has its own content manager, so you can download content from Kiwix itself. But you may also download the ZIM file from the Kiwix Web site (http://www.kiwix.org) or using the Mediawiki Collection extension.

In the future, we want to have a platform (something like Itunes) to offer  really easy to find and download contents (both ZIM and EPUB files). We have started a project in that perspective. We need your support! 

What is your biggest challenge at this moment in time with Kiwix
Building Kiwix-mobile for Android. We will have a first release in autumn. But we have many other projects running at the same time and others for which we still need volunteers.

Thank you
Emmanuel

#ImpactOCR - Digital publications and the national libraries

According to the #ISBN standard, the "format/means of delivery are irrelevant in deciding whether a product requires an ISBN". However, it is often assumed that a publication requiring an ISBN number is a commercial publication. In the USA and the UK for instance you have to buy your ISBN number or bar code while in Canada they are free because Canada stimulates Canadian culture.

When a standard is not universally applied, it loses application. When all publications are not registered a national library will have to maintain its own system when it is to collect a copy of all publications. As a result the ISBN is dysfunctional as a standard because it does not function as a standard.

When the Wikisourcerers finish the transliteration of a book, it deserves an ISBN number and, national libraries should be aware of these publications. This recognises and registered the work done in the Open Content world. When these books are registered, all the Open Content projects may know that they can concentrate on another book or source.

As the ISBN does not register all publications, it does not do what it is expected to do; function as a standard. 
Thanks,
       GerardM

Learning another language II

Learning to vocalise #Arabic can be done on the Internet. There are websites like Mount Hira where you find Arabic to the right, a transliteration to the left with an explanation in English underneath. What really helps is that you can listen to the recitation of a surah by line.

It is great but there is room for improvement. Improvement that can happen at Mount Hira but also at a Wikisource.

• Show all the text as text and not as graphics
• Allow for the Arabic text to be shown in fonts representing different writing styles
• Allow for the explanations to be shown in a language that can be selected

Learning to vocalise what you read is one use case, learning Arabic is another and learning the Koran is a third. Wikisource has the potential to be a place for all three objectives.

There are always people who are interested in reading the source documents about a religion, any religion. The great thing of Wikisource is that you can include the wikilinks explaining the terms that are ambiguous or obscure.

Typically these source documents are readily available and out of copyright. Including them in Wikisource will gain it more public. Wikisource is an obvious place because it has a reputation to keep up; the reputation that original documents are original.

Thanks,

       GerardM

The Hebrew #Wikipedia is bigger than all of #Wikisource

When you compare the statistics for Wikipedia and Wikisource, the Wikipedia in Hebrew gets more eyeballs than all Wikisources combined. When you consider the potential public for both projects, the public for Wikisource is bigger by orders of magnitude.

On the main page of the English Wikisource it says: "We now have 783,122 texts in the English language library". It is less clear how many of these texts are in a final form; meaning ready for casual readers. The pages linked to the proof read tool indicate 691 completed pages and 3588 pages ready for proofreading. This does not imply that there are 691 text that are ready.

For a reader, the sources at Wikisource are works in progress. A text featured on the Wikisource main page, like the Celtic Fairy tales, is very much a Wiki page. The presentation of the text and illustrations is very much accidental. It is a bit sad is, but the pages where easier to read when they still needed to be proofread.

As you can see, the long lines below are not easy to read and the font used in the original book made the text more legible.

The Hebrew Wikipedia is easy to read. We can and should do better for Wikisource.
Thanks,
    GerardM

Wikisourcery

Fairly often when you complain about issues Wikimedia, there is somebody who notices, who cares. This is the sourcery of the crowds, the magic of our communities. Compare the picture above with the picture below..

What a difference a day makes ..

Thanks,

        GerardM